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The Three Divisions of the Logic: Being, Essence and Notion

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The Three Divisions of the Logic: Being, Essence and Notion Chapter 7 The Three Divisions of the Logic: Being, Essence and Notion There are three divisions of the Logic: Being, Essence and the Notion (or Concept). In this section I will explain the place and content of each of these divisions. This will allow you to get oriented and able to keep the shape of the whole work in mind while working your way through the whole system chap- ter by chapter. Then, in the four sections to follow I will go through the Logic step by step, before summing up in the final section of Part 2. Throughout Part 2 I will liberally quote from both versions of the Logic – the Science of Logic and the more accessible but less comprehensive Shorter Logic. The aim throughout is to prepare readers for reading and appropriating Hegel’s ideas for themselves. The § numbers in the Science of Logic refer only to the on-line version. §1 The Starting Point of the Logic: Being Let us look to the Introduction to the Science of Logic to see how Hegel justified beginning the Logic from the concept of Pure being. Firstly, he claims that, as we have already explained, he regards the Phenom- enology as having produced the basis for the Logic and the concept from which it is to begin: The Notion of pure science [i.e., the concept from which pure science is to begin], and its deduction is therefore presupposed in the present work in so far as the Phenomenology of Spirit is nothing other than the deduc- tion of it. Science of Logic, §51 He claimed that the Phenomenology of Spirit had created the presuppositions for a system of philosophy based on the concept of pure knowledge. “Absolute knowledge,” the concluding chapter of the Phenomenology, is the fully worked out and concrete concept of the historical starting point, which was simply “pure being,” i.e., pure knowledge, a starting point which turned out to be in- ternally contradictory. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:�0.��63/9789004395848_008 <UN><UN> The Three Divisions of the Logic: Being, Essence and Notion 79 “Pure knowledge” means not knowledge of any particular thing, but pure knowledge, knowledge as such, that is, Logic. He claimed that the concept of Logic “cannot be justified in any other way than by this emergence in con- sciousness” (Science of Logic, §50). What logic is cannot be stated beforehand, rather does this knowledge of what it is first emerge as the final outcome and consummation of the whole exposition. [It can only be justified] by the aid of some reasoned and historical explanations and reflections to make more accessible to ordinary thinking the point of view from which this science is to be considered. Science of Logic, §34 The reference to “ordinary thinking” is not gratuitous. The definition with which any science makes an absolute beginning can- not contain anything other than the precise and correct expression of what is imagined to be the accepted and familiar subject matter and aim of the science. Science of Logic, §50 “Pure Being” is not a concept generated by the Logic and we should not expect the Logic to begin with a definition of ‘Being’. Hegel will only give “precise and correct expression” to what is meant by the term in philosophy. But he is not or claiming that this term can be deduced scientifically – his claim is that it has already been posited objectively by the history of philosophy itself. We read in the section of the Shorter Logic on Pure Being: Logic begins where the proper history of philosophy begins. Philosophy began in the Eleatic school, especially with Parmenides [b. 515bce]. Par- menides, who conceives the absolute as Being, says that ‘Being alone is and Nothing is not’. Such was the true starting-point of philosophy, which is always knowledge by thought: and here for the first time we find pure thought seized and made an object to itself. Enc. Logic, §86 In other words, historically, philosophy began with the concept of Pure Be- ing, and the Phenomenology has shown how this concept developed in the his- tory of philosophy to the point of ‘absolute knowledge’ – a concrete concept of Pure Being, while at the beginning, before there was any prior philosophical <UN>.
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